Big Tent disruption tactic

all opinions are not made equal

note: this tactic is used against many social movements but it was particularly effective at disrupting the 9/11 Truth Movement.

Big
Tent versus Best Evidence

The call for unity in the 9/11 Truth Movement (no matter how silly some of the "claims"
are) disrupts groups under the guise of uniting them. Big Tent discredits
everyone by wrapping us in disinfo while the people calling for unity
come away with the appearance of best intentions (real or otherwise).

excerpt:
I'm really trying to not let this debate get reduced into a
matter of style or opinion. "No planes" theories provide no
contribution to our establishing probable cause to suspect complicity.
They very often come from people who appear far less interested in the
most well founded evidence. And ultimately, they are used by mainstream
shills to question our sanity.
There is a definitive strategic decision to be made here. You either think
the 9/11 truth movement should promote only its best founded evidence
and theories, or you think it should also promote is more speculative
hypotheses. Can we afford to have the 'big tent' mentality in a revolutionary
movement highly susceptible to espionage and subversion?
No!
I anticipate the possible responses of people in the movement who might
get on me about how we all just need to get along. Or how I need to have
a friendly tone about everything. Or how I should engage these people
in debate. Or how I should simply provide a better example. Or how I should
not alienate naive yet well intended people pushing for the truth.
No!
Representing the truth is not bending into popular appeals to unity that
subvert that effort. The atomic weight of argon doesn't change based on
popular opinion, and large airplanes hit the WTC.

and an excerpt from a response:

The important point to remember is that the extreme lunacy and the
extreme abusers make the moderate ones look palatable -- don't fall
for this.

We need to stop trying to prevent a split in the movement that is inherent
to our having been infiltrated by those with different priorities. This
split has been there since the beginning and its not going away.
This is one important reason to reject the 'big tent' mentality. The core
of this movement, its facts and priorities have not changed. We have established
probable cause to suspect government complicity. Anything detracting from
this case or its promotion is not a part of the truth movement. In other
words, the movement hasn't ever really split. THERE IS ANOTHER MOVEMENT,
ADOPTING OUR THEMES, THAT HAS NO PARTICULAR DEDICATION TO THE TRUTH. I'll
call them the '9/11 speculation movement.' ...

two of the responses:

Blogger is a similar model to indymedia -- everyone has a say and
the reader is trusted to figure things out on their own. Fine. But the
unfortunate reality is that time has shown that that model actually
does not work in 9/11 truth. In 9/11 truth there is an information
war going on, so hoax and disinformation areas typically have endless
resources with which to overwhelm sincere efforts (can't imagine why!).
By linking to every site uncritically, blogger buys into the disinfo
trap of "its all good," albeit with sincere and well meaning
intentions, but in the end, flooding the good stuff with unsubstantiated
hoaxes and a complete unwillingness to engage in self-critique. Those
who question the claims that planes were swapped in Cleveland are attacked
relentlessly by the no planers. Today, take a look, many many 9/11 "truth"
sites say that a plane was never even IN Penn, but was swapped.

I've seen every manifestation of the wildest of 9/11 ideas, from devils
in the smoke to holographic projections. Few of them have a chance of
resonating with the average joe, much less capturing the attention of
investigative journalists. And those precious few subjects that might
resonate, are so polluted and irrevocably tainted with hateful bile
and/or ill-advised commentary, that there's little or no hope.
There needs to be reformation. If the "Truth Movement" is
strict Catholicism, then someone needs to form the Church Of England.
(For lack of a better analogy.)
Settle on five clear, concise, and believable core issues that point
to serious cause for concern. Keep them simple. Then, learn to act like
Proctor & Gamble and "sell" these clear ideas with simple
eloquence in a professional and credible way.
If it works, and it gains traction with the public, every "truth
group" will be scrambling to follow your lead.

The Big Tent refers to strategy of inclusiveness to grow the 9/11 Truth
Movement. Big Tent emphasizes tolerance of diverse ideas and theories
over quality of evidence and reasoning. The strategy has long been reflected
in websites and books that uncritically endorse the gamut of materials
purporting to disprove the official story, as if the authors never met
a theory of official complicity they didn't like.

The Appeal of the Big Tent

The Big Tent idea appeals to the egalitarian and idealistic values of
grassroots activists in social justice movements such as the 9/11 Truth
Movement. It seems to represent a kind of antithesis to the values of
whoever was apparently behind the crimes of 9/11/01 -- a highly exclusive
and secretive cabal wielding murderous power. In particular, Big Tent
seems to embody at least three values, each seemingly beneficial to the
Movement:

equality : Treating all ideas equally values each person's contributions
and gives them a place in the movement.

inclusiveness : Being open to all ideas makes everyone feel welcome
and grows the movement.

unity : Avoiding criticism of each other's ideas fosters unity, essential
to the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the movement.

The fact that these values closely parallel the egalitarianism, tolerance
of diversity, and coalition-building championed in populist and progressive
social movements makes them difficult to criticize. However, unlike the
application of these values to people in traditional social movements,
the 9/11 Truth Movement's Big Tent applies them to ideas. Conflating the
respect due people with the respect due ideas is a fundamental error at
the heart of the Movement's failure to break into the mainstream thus
far.

Putting All Your Soldiers in One Tent

This website demonstrates in a number of ways that the primary weapon
of the cover-up in the information war is the showcasing of unfounded
and absurd theories purporting to disprove the official story. Represented
as typifying the work of 9/11 "conspiracy theorists", such theories
serve to create a false dialectic with the effect of overshadowing challenges
to the official story based on evidence and reason.
To the extent that all of the work of 9/11 skeptics can be successfully
portrayed as belonging to the same ball of wax, it can be dismissed as
the work of conspiracy theorists with deficient critical thinking skills,
the quality of the better work notwithstanding. The Big Tent strategy
thus plays into the primary tool of the cover-up.
In a shooting war, it is foolish to house all of an army's soldiers in
one big tent where they could be wiped out by a single bomb attack. In
a similar way, the Big Tent is a poor strategy in an information war since
it makes all the ideas under one tent vulnerable to an attack on the weakest
ones.

Enforcing Mediocrity

Rather than growing the 9/11 Truth Movement, the Big Tent strategy promises
to limit it by facilitating straw man attacks such as Popular Mechanics',
and by discouraging the peer-review that the work of 9/11 skeptics desperately
needs. Any investigation, to be taken seriously, must have a means of
distinguishing between baseless and substantial claims. The progress of
science is a result of the application of the scientific method, which
subjects theories to a repeated process of observation, hypothesis, experiment,
and revision, enforced by peer review. Theories not supported by or invalidated
by observation are discarded. The 9/11 Truth Movement's Big Tent has functioned
in a way that is antithetical to the process of science, as it does not
admit any process for invalidating theories. Let's revisit the three values
enumerated above, noting their implied proscriptions and prescriptions.

equality : No researchers should be regarded as more credible than
any others, and all theories should be treated as equal.

inclusiveness : No researchers should be ignored (faults in their
work or proven associations -- such as with Nazi groups -- notwithstanding),
and no theories should be dismissed.

unity : Researchers should avoiding criticizing each other's ideas,
and should support the work of other 9/11 skeptics, because they are
on the same side.

It is as if the 9/11 skeptics have been stuck in a brainstorming stage
ever since the 9/11/01 attack. Most of the behavioral norms described
above are appropriate in the initial stages of a project, as they help
avoid the premature elimination, due to preconceived ideas, of possible
explanations and approaches that might bear fruit. However, a fixation
at the brainstorming stage has prevented the 9/11 Truth movement from
evolving to a second stage of investigation, in which many of the options
on the table are recognized as absurd or untenable. A process of discernment
and verification should have emerged, resulting in a core of widely agreed-upon
hypotheses that are well supported by the evidence.
Individual researchers have in fact conducted such a process, and published
their findings, on the Internet, in books, and on a few DVDs. Yet the
work of such careful, principled researchers has been largely eclipsed
by material that mixes sensationalism with unverifiable to patently absurd
claims, for a number of reasons, including:

The lack of any official sanction or venue in which the evidence
against the official story of 9/11 can be debated by qualified people
without fear of professional or personal retribution. (The ScholarsFor911Truth.org
website presents the appearance of such a venue but is anything but.)

The uncontrolled and anonymous nature of the Internet, making it
an ideal vehicle for the injection of an ever-changing array of disinformational
claims and attacks against genuine researchers by Internet personas.

The inability of careful researchers to match the resources behind
slick productions like In Plane Site, Loose Change, and 9/11 Pentagon
Strike.

The refusal to recognize the importance of enforcing reasonable standards
of evidence and argument is reinforced by the assumption -- which ignores
the history of COINTELPRO-type programs -- that all people proclaiming
themselves to be 9/11 skeptics are sincere. Even if that assumption were
correct, the strategy would be counterproductive to the development of
credible challenges to the official story because it engenders a culture
that is hostile to constructive criticism. Researchers who debunk unfounded
theories and address the need for quality work are castigated as divisive,
jealous, biased, and disrespectful.
With no procedure for rejecting a theory, the Big Tent adherents continue
to give space to such theories as the following, despite their having
been conclusively debunked:

The Building 6 explosion theory

The Pentagon small plane or missile theory

The South Tower pod-plane theory

For over four years in some cases, the same theories have continued
to recirculate, often with slight variations and claims of new evidence
to support them.
Professor Steven Jones noted the potential for untestable claims (such
as the pod-plane theory) to damage the efforts of serious investigators
of the 9/11/01 attack.

The Big Tent In the 9/11 movement there appear to be phases in which disinformation
techniques are tried, are pushed hard, and then are either debunked
or functionally discarded such that anyone still promoting them are
considered disingenuous or extremely naive.
In 2004, theories that the WTC towers were not hit by commercial jetliners
began to be heavily promoted, after being floated in 2003. These ideas
held that the jetliner crashes were faked using some combination of
cargo planes, missile strikes, holograms, substituted media footage,
and a canister projectile mounted in the South Tower and triggered to
eject "appropriate debris" onto the streets of NYC. These
ideas still litter the Web but are now largely ignored. More recently
other variants of the no-jetliners theme have been promoted, including
suggestions that Flight 93 did not crash in PA, and that radiation was
discovered at all three crash sites.
While the more extreme no-jetliner ideas tend to die down after enjoying
some notoriety, theories that a jetliner did not crash at the Pentagon
-- variants of an idea effectively promoted since early 2002 -- persist.One technique which has recently been promoted in the 9/11 Truth
Movement is the "Big Tent" idea -- that all theories must
be embraced in order to grow the movement. It doesn't take a rocket
scientist to quickly realize that this technique benefits the disinformation
promoters, not those promoting competent scientific analyses,
like Steven Jones. Rational analyses of what happened on 9/11
will ultimately expose the truth, while nonscientific analyses can only
be counterproductive to that end. Indeed, the association of
ideas like pods, no planes, and missiles with Jones' analyses will tend
to drain credibility from Jones' paper, while benefiting nonscientific
or disinformation promoters. Interestingly, many of those promoting
the most extreme ideas appear to have unlimited cash, unlimited free
time, and unlimited bandwidth to promote their efforts -- resources
that individuals like Jones cannot match.
Importantly, Big Tent preys on good people. Those who want to
expose truth are the same people who often want to help other people
and consequently, can often be victimized or manipulated when their
values -- a hope for equal treatment of all peoples in the world --
are exploited to shame them into embracing nonsense theories in order
to 'treat all fairly.'
Ultimately, the Big Tent approach can be expected to limit the 9/11
Truth Movement to those willing to digest hoaxes along with the real
information. Inevitably, this will keep credible media and researchers
away from the movement in order to distance themselves from what they
might describe as laughable, or ideas which would negatively
impact their careers if they were associated with them. Thus, importantly,
Steven Jones has included statements in his paper to openly state that
he does not endorse the more extreme nonsense that commercial jets did
not strike the WTC towers. However, when the Big Tent idea is employed,
people like Jones who are willing to stand up against nonsense do not
have a secure network of support to stand behind them and are left open
for personal attacks by people like Gerard Holmgren [emphases
added]

The persistence of severe errors such as no-757 can be explained with
a prevailing ideology in 9/11 truthseeking, the Big Tent: the reluctance
to point out faults in research by others, in the name of "we're
all in the same boat". It should be clear that this attitude does
not advance critical thinking.
(One error that goes round and round for years in the echo chamber of
uncritical 9/11 activism even involves an actual tent, being carried
into the Pentagon area, confused with supposed evidence being smuggled
out.)
It is true that Big Tent does suck a lot of people into the ranks of
those who doubt the official story of 9/11. In the end sheer numbers
may be enough, even if the facts of those involved are a bit off.
However, the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks"
approach has detrimental side effects, most serious of which is the
potential for widespread damage if one aspect of the whole enterprise
is discredited. If all the different lines of inquiry were in their own tents, having a grenade rolled into one would not be so
bad for the entire encampment.
That is what probably awaits the no-plane school of
no-thought (ie. the group of theories that claims that some of the flights
or planes didn't take part in the attacks), when the Pentagon security
camera videos are released. At least their most widely recognized claim,
no-Pentagon-757, will be destroyed. Getting rid of this most controversial
time-sink would only be good, but thanks to Big Tent, the damage may
extend to more promising fields of research.
But 9/11 Truth has advanced too far to be stopped by the Pentagon videos,
an ace up the sleeve. As a matter of fact, it may be possible that also
the perperators suffer from their own Big Tent: perhaps they
cannot afford to let even a single set of claims move forward, without
giving away the whole game.